It’s Not Facebook; It’s Your Friends

It is fashionable to hate Facebook / act like you are too cool for Facebook / profess boredom with Facebook. Even I admit to recently posting on Twitter, “FB friends: No need to put LOL at the end of every sentence. Let’s agree I assume you are laughing like an assclown at everything you say.”

My tweet illustrates my point: It is not really Facebook; it is your friends, or your “friends,” an important distinction I like to make. Facebook is simply a shell, a tool for humans to populate and fill with their updates, pictures, and games. If Facebook makes you crazy, do not blame Facebook. Blame the Facebook experience your “friends” have created for you.

Facebook does not encourage your “friends” to post “rain, rain go away” on every single rainy day, nor was it Facebook’s idea for your “friends” to give you a play-by-play of each football game. In fact, Facebook probably agrees with you that, if you wanted to follow that football game, you would have watched it yourself.

Facebook does deserve some of the blame for allowing creation of inane quizzes, but surely Facebook never intended for your “friends” to fill your computer screen finding out a) their porn names, b) how many children they will have, c) which Katy Perry song they are, and d) what kind of lover they are, all in the same half hour. Facebook thought your friends had work to do.

At the same time, without Facebook, how would you have found out that you could stay in Wells Beach, Maine for half the price of snottier nearby towns? Or that you and your law school roommate who moved to Argentina had a baby within a month? Or that your impending gum graft will indeed be as bad as you expect?

Without Facebook, your life would not be richer for watching that baby dance to All the Single Ladies.

So stop blaming Facebook. Spend a few minutes to hide some of your “friends,” especially the quiz-lovers. Maybe delete a few “friends” that you accepted because you saw that they went to your high school, although in all honesty you cannot remember them. Then go ask the remaining friends where is the best pumpkin patch in Atlanta. And while you are at it, check on whether your high school boyfriend has gotten fat.